Every book I write, I write for one person

When I started the first novel that I would finish, I gave myself permission to quit at any time.

If I hated the research? Quit. If I stopped having fun writing it? Quit. If publishing didn’t want it? Quit.

I was not the person you hear the stories about. The one who vows to never give up. The one who will write 1000 books in pursuit of a publishing contract.

No. I wrote the book because I wanted to write the book. And I discovered that writing was still something I loved and was good at and wanted to keep doing.

Since starting that first project, I’ve finished seven novels (four published, one coming this year, one currently in my agent’s reading queue). 

I did quit once in the midst of all that. Because querying stole the joy of it. But after about nine months away, I found my way back and eventually found my way into a series of publishing contracts. 

Still, I write because I want to write. And I write each book, I realized somewhere along the way, for one reader.

If each book can find its way into that reader’s hands, whatever it’s other successes or failures are, it is—for me—a success.

*

For The Lioness, a book that follows a French noblewoman-turned-pirate who has largely been erased from history, that perfect reader found me before the book ever hit shelves.

I’d written that book for several reasons, but one of the ones was this: I wanted to be a gateway drug to historical fiction for people who normally found it boring, intimidating, or overly verbose.

My author friend Sami turned out to be that exact person I was writing for.

And I got lucky enough to find more Samis once the book was published.

I will never get tired of hearing someone say they normally don’t like historical fiction, but my book gave them an in.

*

For The Wicked Unseen, a story about the disappearance of a preacher’s daughter during the Satanic Panic, the perfect reader found me after publication. The book was there to tell her own story back to her–and take her kids with her on the journey.

 

*

We Are the Beasts found its perfect reader in an unexpected place: someone I love dearly who asked to read it when it was still in draft form.

“It shaped my feminism,” they told me later. “It made me feel the things I’d previously only intellectually considered.”

A year or so later, the book published and found more readers who found something true and resonant in similar ways:

*

Then, there is And the Trees Stare Back. I love every book I write, but this is the one that I wrote for me. The ideal reader, the person this book needed to reach, was my younger self.

And what a joy it is to find a few more mes out there already even before this book is officially on shelves:

*

Last month, I finished writing my seventh manuscript, a queer, anti-fascist heist book based on a true story. It is with its second and third readers now (my agent and my love) and hopefully soon it will slip into editor inboxes and start the oft-long, oft-slow, always-unpredictable journey toward (hopefully) publication.

And today I wonder who this one is for. I wonder who will find hope in those pages. Who will wrestle with hard questions. Who will see themselves as revolutionary, who will become revolutionary.

There are so many books that have changed my life over the years. So many books that I felt were written just for me.

The Poisonwood Bible, which saw me and held me. Graceling and Three Dark Crowns, which gave me hope in a hopeless time. Bad Witch Burning, which showed me one of my hardest truths on the page.

This is the soul of why I write books, despite the publishing industry’s unpredictable financials, despite book bans, despite the ever-present uncertainty of whether each new book will sell.

Because I need my books to find that one reader.

I hope that one of them finds that reader in you.